Composite / Jan Kempenaers

Roma Publication 278

Jan Kempenaers has been photographing urban and natural landscapes for over two decades. For this series of images, he applies the formal language of the documentary style, with its detached viewpoint emphasising the isolation and desolation of the strange structures in the frame. This causes a heightened sense of inaccessibility in the viewer, a sense of alienation exacerbated by the alien nature of the structures themselves. What are these objects, who built them, and why? Interspersed are composite photographs Kempenaers has made by cutting details from the images and overlapping them, thereby creating darkly idiosyncratic renderings of the same subjects.